Canaanite shift

This vowel shift is well attested in Hebrew and other Canaanite languages, but its exact nature has historically been contested.

Brockelmann (1908) held that the Canaanite Shift only affected stressed vowels, formulating the shift as *ā́ > *ṓ.

Bauer and Leander (1922) treat the cases of apparently preserved *ā as evidence for their theory of Hebrew as a mixed language.

Birkeland (1940) discounted some of Brockelmann’s most important counterexamples of the Canaanite Shift. Based on irregular correspondences and evidence from Arabic and Phoenician spellings, he explains II-wy and III-wy perfect forms like קָם and גָּלָה as relatively late contractions from triradical forms like *qawama and *galawa, which postdate the operation of the Canaanite Shift. Word-final cases of -å, in Birkeland’s view, are late restitutions, resulting from dialect borrowing. Having thus eliminated most of the counterexamples that motivated the proponents of stress conditioning, he posits an unconditioned shift of *ā > *ō.

Suchard (2019) found that the Canaanite Shift was absent from words where *ā was preceded by *u or *w in the preceding syllable. He explained the handful of words where the Canaanite Shift occurred despite *u in the preceding syllable (such as ִרִמּוֹן rimmōn ‘pomegranate’ from *rummān-um) as a product of dissimilation of *u to *i when *u was adjacent to a bilabial consonant, a separate sound change known as Suchard's Law.{{Citation |last=Suchard |first=Benjamin |title=The Development of the Biblical Hebrew Vowels: Including a Concise Historical Morphology |date=2019-09-24 |work=The Development of the Biblical Hebrew Vowels |url=https://brill.com/display/title/54039 |access-date=2024-12-30 |publisher=Brill |language=en |isbn=978-90-04-39026-3}}

The shift was so productive in Canaanite languages that it altered their inflectional and derivational morphologies wherever they contained the reflex of a pre-Canaanite *ā, as can be seen in Hebrew, the most attested of Canaanite languages, by comparing it with Arabic, a well-attested non-Canaanite Semitic language.

Classical Arabic فاعل (fāʻil) vs. Tiberian Hebrew פועל (pōʻēl)Wehr 1993

Classical Arabic ات- (-āt) vs. Tiberian Hebrew ות- (-ōṯ)

Classical Arabic فعال (fi‘āl, fa‘āl) vs. Tiberian Hebrew פעול (pă‘ōl, pā‘ōl)

Classical Arabic فأل (faʼl) vs. Tiberian Hebrew פול, פאל (pōl)

In one of the above lexical items (rōš), the shift did not only affect originally long vowels, but also originally short vowels occurring in the vicinity of a historically attested glottal stop in Canaanite.

Transcriptions of the Phoenician language reveal that the change also took place there – see suffete.

Often when new source material in an old Semitic language is uncovered, the Canaanite shift may be used to date the source material or to establish that the source material is written in a specifically Canaanite language. The shift is especially useful since it affects long vowels whose presence is likely to be recorded by matres lectionis such as aleph and waw, even in a defective consonantal script. In languages where the shift occurs, it also gives historical linguists reason to suppose that other shifts may have taken place.

• Chain shift
• Great Vowel Shift

{{Reflist}}

• {{citation|last=Blau, Joshua|author-link=Joshua Blau|year=1996|title=Studies in Hebrew Linguistics|publisher=The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University|location=Jerusalem}}
• {{citation|last=Cross|first=Frank|year=1980|title=Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts|periodical=Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research|publisher=The American Schools of Oriental Research|volume=238|issue=238|pages=1–20|doi=10.2307/1356511|jstor=1356511|s2cid=222445150}}
• {{citation|last=Fox|first=Joshua|year=1996|title=A Sequence of Vowel Shifts in Phoenician and Other Languages|periodical=Journal of Near Eastern Studies|volume=55|pages=37–47|doi=10.1086/373783|s2cid=161890998}}
• {{citation|last=Wehr|first=Hans|year=1993|title=Arabic–English Dictionary|title-link=Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic}}

Category:Vowel shifts

Category:Semitic sound laws

Category:Canaanite languages